Review: Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD “0-8-4”

4 years ago by Cheyton Jain

Credit: ABC

After watching this week’s episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (@AgentsofSHIELD)., I couldn’t help but walk away with just an overall sense of “meh.” After having an above average pilot episode, all the magic of it has seemed to quickly dissipate. The geeky scientist duo “FitzSimmons” has turned from being a great source of comic relief in the first episode, to instead being the source of cringe for the second episode. They became suddenly super hard to understand through their thick accents and did nothing but complain the entire episode. While it was nice to see a nice change of scenery this from the NYC backdrop we always see in these comic book movies/shows, it really doesn’t count if you show a jungle for less than a quarter of the episode and then relegate the rest of the plot progression to the interior of a cargo jet. The plot of the episode boiled down to the clichéd “we are stronger together than we are apart.” You kind of wished it was something a little different, but slowly realized that wouldn’t be the case. The presence of Whedon veteran, J. August Richards (The Hooded Hero), was sorely missed in this week’s episode. Hopefully soon, they will reintroduce his plotline because it was infinitely more interesting than the team bonding exercise we experienced this week. Like the pilot episode, most of the dialogue and the visuals were good, just nothing special. The cast, this time, was actually more likeable across the board (minus “FitzSimmons”) now that we had a solid amount of character development. But once again, nothing special. This week also had a special cameo from Samuel L. Jackson as SHIELD Director Nick Fury. While his cameo didn’t drive the plot forward at all, it definitely provided a nice quick chuckle to close the episode. Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t given up the series entirely after this week, but I have definitely become less sure whether it’ll make the cut for the ABC Fall 2014 TV lineup.